Friday, August 14, 2015

If we build it, they will complain. (John Morris)

Ah yes, transfer users. If you’ve never heard that phrase before, it’s really just a fancy way of identifying users who are moving from one system to another. Upgrading your iPhone? You’re a transfer user. Reacting to that redesign of Facebook? You’re a transfer user. Trying to adjust to that new software program at work that replaced the one you’d been using for 10 years? You’re a transfer user.And one thing we know about transfer users is that they will squawk. They could be moving from steam-powered mainframes to gestural AI systems that read your brainwaves, and you can be as sure as the dawn that your users will protest, grumble, whine, bleat, carp, cavil, grouse.Face it, it’s just human nature. People just don’t like change. Now, there are a whole bunch of fancy psychological ideas to support this concept – status quo bias, loss aversion, the endowment effect – but it’s just the way people are.Think of the all the old idioms that describe just this situation. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Old habits die hard. The leopard can’t change his spots. And my particular favorite, Don’t move my cheese! Believe me, I’ve seen a lot of cheese-moving over the years.How to get around the problem? Jared Spool is a big proponent of incremental change. I can highly recommend his article The Death of the Major Relaunch. Having worked on many major corporate rollouts over the years, I can also recommend putting together a serious communication plan. Tell your users what’s happening, when’s it going to happen, and why it’s going to be happen. Tell them these things in several different ways. Tell them these things multiple times.A final idea is simply to wait. Humans are wonderfully adaptable creatures. That evil abomination that had users storming the corporate gates with torches and pitchforks might well have turned into something that they now can’t live without. Just give it time.And that’s what I generally tell any team I’m on who is ready to jump off the roof after their relaunch generated less than 100% glowing feedback. Take two weeks or a month or so and look at your feedback again. It’ll probably be just fine. If it’s not, though, that’s when you really need to worry.